There should be no “shock” at the disaster unfolding at the moment in Puerto Rico The combination of an ineffectual and venal Administration which has been undermining the public sector since it took office and of more intense hurricanes driven by extreme climate change was bound to create an humanitarian crisis in this part of the United States. The crisis should also been expected because Puerto Rico adopted the fossil fuel technology & culture that needs a complicated and ultimately fragile (relative to the strength of natural forces like hurricanes & flooding) infrastructure of highways, airports, trucks, gasoline, and people to run it that was difficult to create & sustain on a small tropical island.

As in Florida on the coasts and Texas along the Gulf of Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands will be inundated by the rising waters and hit, over & over, by ferocious & huge storms (Hurricane Irma was the size of France!) that will batter it consistently over the coming decades. As tropical areas, these places are also going to be inhospitable to human habitation in less than 30 years.

So what is the solution for people living in those parts of the world, those parts of the United States? Do they continue to try to make the fossil fuel lifestyle fit a natural world openly hostile to it, assuming that gasoline run machines and technology are strong enough to stand against the force of extreme climate change? Or should Americans living in parts of the U.S. that are going to be at the epicenter of extreme global warming and climate change leave those areas and emigrate within the U.S. to higher ground?

I have been dancing a lot lately! Tango, for those of you who don’t know, is a peculiar social dance that is very difficult to learn to dance well and is done in a close embrace with one’s partner. The beautiful tango music and the intimate physical contact does make me feel better, at least for the couple of minutes each song lasts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL9scCF6F1E

Last night I was talking to a dance buddy (let’s call him Mr. T) after we had ended a tanda together. He was dreaming about moving to Florida. There is a whole community of Québecois retired in Florida, happily soaking up the sun and speaking French. Mr. T yearns to be by the beach and watch the bikini-clad girls go by (not an unusual desire for a Northern man as women in up here in Canada spend much of their time wrapped up in multiple layers of clothing!).

I had suggested to Mr. T that Florida, especially by the shore, might not be the safest place to retire. He was a bit taken aback by the scale of Hurricane Irma (and there are a couple more lining up behind her!), but he figured that an occasional storm was par for the course in that part of the world.

And here is the issue I have with this very usual insouciance: it represents a misunderstanding of the extreme effects of climate change, and a refusal to acknowledge the radical shifts we will need to make in our modes of living to survive under these changes! Sometime it feels to me as if no one is taking extreme global climate change to heart (except, of course, the climate scientists, but even some of these continue to live in places like Houston and Florida!).

For example, these “best places to live when you retire” sites are still touting Panama, Costa Rica, and Portugal among other tropical or warm place as best places to spend one’s golden years, without any mention about how rising waters, more violent hurricanes, out of control forest fires, and massive numbers of environmental refugees will strain those countries infrastructures and governments! https://internationalliving.com/the-best-places-to-retire/

But how to explain complex environmental systems clearly enough to suggest what are the best choices in where and how to live in the coming years, especially to someone who is so distanced from the natural world as to be completely oblivious about it? Well, Mr. T, here is something to think about before you make that move to Florida: http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/the-great-flood/

The USA was originally created with the idea of Manifest Destiny, which meant that Europeans had, they felt, the God-given right to move across the continental United States, setting up new communities, opening up new farms, building new towns; and, in the process, dispossessing the indigenous peoples.

The places chosen to settle had fertile land, resources of some sort (e.g. lumber, minerals, water), and most importantly, water routes to transport goods, resources, and people. With the coming of the railroads, and more importantly, the interstate highways, where to live and where to do business began to be a question with a much more extensive set of options. The answers were very random: where could the most money be made, where could the best living be had, where was the most amount of resources to be found? Many of the answers drove people toward the large cities, or to places with industry, or to communities in need of servants and service workers.

And, in the past twenty years, as the baby boomers (full disclosure: my generation) began to retire, the answer was where the weather was mild and the view beautiful: so coastlines began to be filled with vacation homes, then retirement homes and finally nursing homes. But just because a place could be lived in, especially with the use of industrial grade destruction of the land and environment, does not mean that it should have been used for unfettered residential or resort development!

So, if you know for sure that these coastlines are going to be underwater in the foreseeable future, what is the wisest course of action? Why not consider moving to higher ground?

There have been large movements of people all during US history. The one that comes to mind is the Great Migration of six million black folks out of the South to the North and West between 1916 and 1970. These people were not rich, but they improved their lives by moving to a better part of the country.

I believe that as climate change in our country gets more extreme with more and more places becoming unliveable due to drought, fire, and flood, we are about to enter another era of great population movement within our country.

In an ideal world, the government (Federal or state) would fund the relocation by buying the homes that are in endangered neighbourhoods, freeing the inhabitants to move elsewhere. The government should also make strict zoning laws to prevent desperate people from living close to toxic industrial sites. And the companies that run these sites should be heavily fined and made to pay the clean up costs of their pollution.

But we are dealing with a much less than ideal world. The Texas state government is allowing the French company, whose chemicals are throwing noxious smoke into the air in Crosby Texas, to keep hidden the actual components of that smoke! And it already looks as if much of the money earmarked for help to Houston will find its way into resources for Republican lawmakers in Texas for the 2018 midterm elections.

So my question becomes, if the government can not be counted on to help, what can we do as individuals and small communities? And can we do this better in the 21st century than we did in the 19th?